The Fulcrum of the Gaslight

Why False Equivalence Is One of Democracy’s Most Dangerous Lies

There’s a trick at the center of American political discourse—so deeply embedded that even well-meaning people don’t realize they’re performing it. It goes like this: if you’re a fair-minded individual, you must believe that both political parties are fundamentally the same. To assert a meaningful difference in their commitment to truth, democracy, or constitutional governance is to betray your objectivity. In this view, saying the Republican Party is more dangerous than the Democratic Party isn’t just a factual judgment. Rather, it’s a tribal confession.

This, more than any specific lie or scandal, is the master gaslight of our era. It is the epistemic sleight of hand that has broken the American mind.

Because here’s the truth: one party has become a conspiracy cult organized around personal loyalty to a would-be autocrat, willing to burn down democratic institutions for power. And the other… hasn’t. That’s not partisanship. That’s observation.

To deny that difference isn’t neutrality. It’s disorientation.

This false equivalence is not just intellectually lazy. It’s a deliberate strategy to disarm the public’s capacity for understanding reality at the very moment when moral discernment is most needed. It trains citizens to see betrayal and resistance as equally suspect, to treat sedition and institutional defense as symmetrical extremes. It creates an imaginary center that floats somewhere between coherence and collapse—and insists that “balance” means staying there.

Consider how this works in practice: Trump’s indictments for crimes he actually committed are treated as equivalent to the imaginary “weaponization” of law enforcement under Biden. Trump had classified documents photographed in boxes at Mar-a-Lago. His charity was shut down for criminal self-dealing. We have him on tape asking Georgia officials to “find” exactly enough votes to overturn the election. But prosecuting these documented crimes becomes “lawfare”—equivalent, somehow, to the fever dreams in which children are trafficked from the basement of a pizza parlor that doesn’t have a basement.

Only in a post-truth environment—where slogans pass for arguments and outrage replaces analysis—could such equivalences be drawn. To treat the prosecution of crimes as morally equal to the invention of conspiracies is not just unserious. It’s insane.

Yes, the Democratic Party is flawed. Yes, liberal institutions have failed in profound ways—some of which I’ve critiqued in these very digital pages. But they remain broadly committed to elections, peaceful transfers of power, constitutional process, and pluralistic government. That’s not nothing. That’s the foundation of everything.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party has nominated a man who tried to overturn an election, incited violence against political opponents, promised to dismantle the civil service, and pledged to weaponize the Justice Department against critics. He now enjoys the open support of insurrectionists, foreign adversaries, and indicted financiers. This is not business as usual. This is the death spiral of democratic governance.

And it continues. With a single phone call to Governor Greg Abbott, Trump persuaded Texas Republicans to abandon their response to the Central Texas floods and instead embark on a radical gerrymandering crusade—targeting five new congressional seats through brute procedural power. Governance discarded. Power prioritized.

To equate these two forces is not fairness. It is moral blindness.

And that blindness has a function. It provides cover. It allows elites to keep access. It permits institutions to pretend they’re not implicated. It flatters audiences who want to feel superior to the “partisans.” But in a democracy, refusing to take sides when the stakes are constitutional survival isn’t wisdom—it’s abdication.

The center, properly understood, isn’t the midpoint between parties. It’s the ground where reality lives. And right now, that ground is under siege—not from both sides, but from one.

So no, I will not pretend both parties are the same. I will not apologize for calling authoritarianism what it is. And I will not lend credibility to the lie that recognizing asymmetry is itself a form of extremism.

That’s the fulcrum of the gaslight. That’s the belief they need you to accept in order to keep breaking reality apart.

Don’t believe it.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And one party has abandoned the truth.

The center must be held. But it can only be held by those willing to name who’s trying to tear it down.